Joel Cazares of Building Healthy Communities joins other activists in a news conference Tuesday at Santa Ana City Hall. (Photo by Paul Rodriguez, Orange County Register/SCNG)

An Orange County Sheriff's deputy participating in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wears an ICE pin. ICE will be put on notice that Santa Ana will reduce the number of detainees to a maximum of 128, resulting in the closure of one jail module and a $663,743 annual net revenue loss. (File photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)

SANTA ANA – In making history Tuesday as the first city in Orange County to adopt a sanctuary resolution ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Santa Ana has potentially jeopardized federal funding. But a more immediate financial impact comes from a decision the City Council made immediately after.

Council members, following a 5-0 vote declaring the city a sanctuary for all residents regardless of immigration status, also voted unanimously on a first step to phase out a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at Santa Ana Jail.

Specifically, ICE will be put on notice that the city will reduce the number of detainees to a maximum of 128, resulting in the closure of one jail module and a $663,743 annual net revenue loss. A full contract termination would create a $2 million hole annually, City Manager David Cavazos said, while Santa Ana faces repaying about $24 million plus interest through 2024 for building the jail it opened in 1997.

“I think we have a compelling moral need that we see how we can remove ourselves from this relationship,” said Mayor Pro Tem Vincent Sarmiento. He added, however, that the city has to be “intelligent” about mitigating the $663,743 gap.

“If we don’t have money coming, it might get taken out of parks and recreation, it might get taken out of public works, and that means services being reduced for those very residents we are trying to protect,” Sarmiento said.

ICE “is prepared to adjust its operations accordingly,” Lori Haley, a spokeswoman for the federal agency, said Wednesday in a statement about the bed number reduction.

“That said, ICE values its longstanding relationship with the city of Santa Ana,” said Haley, adding that the Santa Ana Jail “is by far the smallest contract detention facility utilized by ICE in the Los Angeles area.”

Council members also voted to continue negotiating jail officer retirement incentives, hire part-time instead of full-time officers and release a request for qualifications for a jail reuse study with the requirement that two of three proposals examine repurposing the facility.

Santa Ana “will be in a better position” to come up with a specific timeline for the contract termination once the evaluation is completed, Cavazos said.

The contract is set to expire June 30, 2020, but the city or ICE can give a 90-day notification to cancel the contract at any time. Council members have yet to fulfill the request by dozens of immigrants-rights activists for a timeline by Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, to end the contract.

“This city will only be a true sanctuary when it terminates its contract with ICE,” said Christina Fialho, an attorney in Costa Mesa and co-founder of the nonprofit Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement. “No other city that has declared itself a sanctuary also has a detention facility with ICE.”

Councilman Sal Tinajero said the points made by Fialho and other public comment speakers were valid, but that Santa Ana’s situation is different from that of many cities.

“Other cities are not in the jail business,” Tinajero said. “The jail contract was put into effect awhile back. Today is a new day. We have declared ourselves a sanctuary city and now we have to look at making adjustments to be consistent with those values across the board.”

Though no public speakers at the council meeting Tuesday spoke out against the sanctuary resolution, Tim Rush, 61, a Santa Ana resident for 20 years, said Wednesday that the adopted policy “paints a bull’s eye” on the city.

“Given the incoming administration, you would think if anything, this would be the last thing they would do,” said Rush, president of the Wilshire Square Neighborhood Association. “It’s putting the city at tremendous risk of losing a great deal of federal funding, which could very well push the city into bankruptcy.”

But Annie Lai, an assistant clinical professor at UC Irvine, said the threat of losing federal funding for Santa Ana is “limited by the 10th Amendment, if not nonexistent.”

Councilman Michele Martinez and Mayor Miguel Pulido were not present for the vote. Council members excused Martinez for the absence, but in a rare move, did not excuse Pulido.

“I just think that he always does this whenever there’s very pressing issues,” said Tinajero, who called for a sanctuary ordinance to be considered at the next council meeting.

Pulido could not be reached for comment.

Immigrants-rights activists rallied after Santa Ana’s historic sanctuary vote, and hope their momentum carries to the largest city in the county – Anaheim.

“There was a change in the (Anaheim) council in this election,” said Carlos Perea, policy and programs director for the organization Resilience OC. “(Elected leaders) ran under the platform of ensuring that all voices from the residents, especially the marginalized and Latino residents, would be heard, and we’re going to test that.”

Jessica Kwong covers Santa Ana and transportation for The Orange County Register. A Los Angeles native, Kwong grew up speaking Spanish, Cantonese and English, in that order, and has spent much of her journalism career working in Spanish-language media. She started her career at the San Francisco Chronicle and has also been a staff writer for the San Antonio Express-News, La Opinión, Time Warner Cable Sports and the San Francisco Examiner. Kwong has won awards from the National Association of Hispanic Publications, California Newspaper Publishers Association, San Francisco Peninsula Press Club and East Bay Press Club and has been a fellow for The New York Times and Hearst Newspapers. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature in Spanish and English and Mass Communications from the University of California, Berkeley.

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